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In Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, a raven-haired pregnant woman starts over, though not because she wants to. After deciding to end things by jumping off a bridge into the cold sea, she’s taken in by the Dr. Frankenstein-esque Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Rebirth, not revival, motivates him. A mad-scientist type specializing in surgeries with zanily macabre outcomes — say, one ending with a bulldog’s head successfully sewn to a chicken’s body — Baxter thinks it sensible to scrap his latest victim’s brain and replace it with her fetus’s still-developing one. As he sees it, honoring the woman’s wishes to end her life clears him to give the baby a chance at one of its own. 

Renamed Bella (a tremendous Emma Stone), the baby-woman who emerges is about what you’d expect, her gait wobbly and her grasp on manners and vocabulary wobblier. (She greets one man, for instance, with a limp-fisted smack to the face.) But her development progresses much faster than most infants, a sex drive and general desire to see the world beyond the one Baxter fretfully locks her in announcing themselves in what seems like just a few weeks.

Read the full review on South Sound.